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THE GOD OF THE GOSPEL
Robert W. Jenson
I have a text, though I did not notice this until sometime after
writing my talk. It ie from the 14th chapter of Acts. Paul and
Barnabas perform a healing in the pagan city of Lystra, and are taken
for the latest avatars of Zeus and Hermes. They emphatically reject the
cultic honor offered them, and then say, "We are here to speak the gos
pel to you, that you may turn from such barren deities to the living
God."
We here are - mostly at least - persons who have heard the
gospel that Paul and Barnabas went out to speak, have been baptized
into it, are therefore ourselves now obligated to speak it, and are
trying to do that. It is a necessary question: What is the gospel sup-
posed to do for its hearers? What will it mean to those who hear us, if
they believe what we say?
It is presently a common supposition, perhaps the common sup-
position, that the gospel’s gift to us can be most compendiously stated
by some religious or psychological or political or moral slogan: the gos-
pel “forgives sin" or "liberates" or "justifies" or "puts to death," or
"empowers" or whatever. It does this, of course, on behalf of God, but
the presence and agency of God is taken as the invariable given of the
event, not as itself the gift of the event.Baltimore 2
Only a little perusal of the New Testament must, however, reveal
that the New Testament does not look at the matter in this way at all.
Or at least, it does not look at the matter in this way with respect to
gentile Christians, which is what nearly all of us here are. When a Jew
confesses that Jesus is Messiah, and is baptized into this new apprehen-
sion of his or her own aboriginal hope, the activity and presence of the
God of Israel is indeed the invariant supposition of the event. A Jew
who is baptized does not break with his or her gods, to draw near to
the true God; he or she was with the true God all along. Not so, how-
ever, when the gospel’s mission begins the promised ingathering of the
nations ~ that is, most of us - to Zion.
The author of Ephesians admonishes us gentile believers to re-
member that prior to baptism we were “alienated from the commonwealth
of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and
without God in the world." (Eph. 2:11-12) For us, the gospel message is
what our special apostle called it, precisely a summons and permission to
turn “from idols, to serve the living and true God” (I Thess. 1:9) - and
indeed, this very language was evidently the great slogan of the whole
earliest gospel-mission.
For us gentiles, the blessing of the gospel is that it un-
expectedly and wonderfully identifies who the true God is, and that it
newly and amazingly permits us to worship him and even explains how
that is possible. Precisely being able to turn from their gods to the*
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true God occasioned "the joy” with which Paul’s gentile converts
"received the word.” (Ibid., 1:6) Paul nor his converts needed to deny
that worship of the gods may bestow all manner of good things; they
simply renounced such worship as wrong because misdirected.
It is doubtless true that all religions are instigated by the one
God’s self-revelation, and are recognized by him as an inquietude he
has himself implanted in us, It is doubtless therefore true that the
word "God" and other invocations, appearing in the prayers and bless-
ings of any religion at all, carry a hidden reference to the true God of
Israel - that much "inclusive" I still want to be. It is doubtless true
that the End will discover how the history of all the religions is con—
summated in Christ.
But in the act of faith itself, the singular great blessing to be
known is precisely the difference between the old gods to which we
‘were bound and the true God into whose fellowship we are taken. In
the act of faith, we gentile believers recognize ourselves as those who
have worshipped ~ or except for the grace of infant baptism would have
worshipped ~ Moloch the baby-burner or Astarte the universal whore or
Deutsches Blut or the Invisible Hand of capitalist exploitation or Huit~
zelopochtli the drinker of blood, or the Great Metaphor of our gender or
ethnic or class aspiration or the great Nothingness or the third tree in
the forest - tyrants everyone of them, on whom we can look back only
with terror and joy at our rescue.